


shelter

by velociwrangler (annavalentina)



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Mythology, Costumes, Double Penetration, Multi, Spitroasting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-27
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-18 00:14:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29725383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/annavalentina/pseuds/velociwrangler
Summary: AU. Strange creatures play strange hunting games in these woods.
Relationships: Evan MacMillan | The Trapper/Jane Romero/Kazan Yamaoka | The Oni
Kudos: 15





	shelter

**Author's Note:**

> Just a bit of whacky fun written for the Dead by Baelight server, based on Trapper's Krampus skin and Oni's Minotaur skin. Not to be taken too seriously.

He’s a little less well equipped to hunt her in this place, her Minotaur. Snow lies heavy on the branches of the tall, clustered trees. It blankets the ground in drifts and eddies with ice crusts and heavy snow beneath that he has to fight through with every step.

She’s a muse, a sylph, a half-forgotten dream lighting a fire in the fingertips of great artists. She, Jane discovers, can run light-footed across the surface of the snow while he must fight against it with each step. He’s built for warmer climes, and dressed for them. The truth is that she is as well, but she refuses to give any sign of how the cold saps her. His dark eyes, so coldly intelligent beneath the animal veneer, have almost certainly caught the way the gold pulses brightly in her fingertips but gutters as her energy ebbs. Her white robe only barely covers more than his loincloth.

Still, she taunts him. His composure will break, and he will weary himself faster and faster. He is a beast of passion, not patience. If she outlasts him, and he has to break off the chase to go to ground and recover his strength—

Well, she isn’t...wholly sure the thought pleases her, and she hates that. There is so little in this void but the endless chase. If he has to halt, it will be an undeniable victory in her favour. Will their perpetual tug of war then end conclusively in her favour?

Jane clutches the dark bristle of a fir tree, leaning her shoulder against its trunk while she perches high in its branches with dangling sandaled feet. Below he slogs through the snow, but his head is down and his enormous sides labour with each heated breath. He’s struggling. She laughs, letting the clear and mocking sound pierce the air. His horned head twists to her, finding her silhouette quickly, and she’s relieved in a way she doesn’t care to examine as his body visibly suffuses with violent renewed energy and he pushes toward her tree.

If he goes to ground, maybe she should find him, she thinks. That wouldn’t be giving up. That would still fit the mould of the game, surely. If she could happen upon him while he slept in exhaustion—pinion or chain him in some clever way, straddle his massive chest and wake him with her hands on his shoulders or perhaps on his horns—

She scowls a little. It would still be too easy for him to hurt her, in ire or in outraged thrashing. His flat chomping teeth in that long barbarous jaw or kicking legs with that bulging swell of thigh; she doesn’t really know what he’d do to her if he caught her. Perhaps he would simply tear her limb from limb as vengeance for the long chase and these fevered imaginings are the stupidity of a lonely, arrogant muse’s fading rationality.

And then all at once, jarring her abruptly from her self-deprecatory musings, she realizes there is something in the tree beside her.

Once she notices, it’s as if her senses go on overdrive defining and describing it. It is _large_ , man sized, and its low huffing breaths are almost in her ear. There it is, crouched beside her on a bough, balanced on its cloven hooves, eyes fixed on her. Below them the Minotaur bellows, a thunderous sound of fury, as if he suspects his prey will be plucked from his grasp by a competitor before his very eyes.

Jane leaps away. She almost plummets--the tenor of the Minotaur’s voice changes, taking an eager tone--but catches herself, light as air, on another tree’s limb. She knows the golden light burning across her skin must be almost dancing, sputtering as her energy ebbs, but hopes they don’t fully understand what that means.

The goat-headed beast that crouches on the bough that she abandoned, whose haunches had briefly tensed as if to spring, settles back. The basket on its back briefly gapes, then falls shut. They regard each other: she warily, he intently.

It is an ugly thing, she thinks. Yet - magnetic. Its sharp teeth are bared and set together in its long muzzle, horns curving back above its mobile, flicking ears. And heat radiates off of it despite the snow piled on its furry nape and shoulders. Below them the Minotaur snorts once but no longer bellows, only watching with burning intensity. She’s come to know him in a strange way, her hunter, her Minotaur. Nothing makes him seethe quite like being completely impotent to act.

Jane rises to her feet on the bough and the creature follows her lead. She dislikes that. As she studies him a name comes to mind, drifting out of the Fog or perhaps coming to her through a muse’s nature the way ideas or knowledge sometimes do. Names, ideas, information, passing to her through the generous membrane of inspiration. Someone has written songs and told tales about him, she thinks. They were tinged with fear.

 _Krampus._ Who comes and collects the wicked children and takes them away.

Well, Jane isn’t a child. And no matter the cold, she has warmth left in her and running to do. She jumps backward, drifting, expending strength in a flash of bravado. _You’ll never catch me. I can fly forever. Don’t even try._

Krampus watches, but doesn’t follow. She keeps going, glancing back occasionally to see his figure recede in the distance, hearing the heavy tread of her Minotaur resume following her below.

+++

In the end, her Minotaur does break first. He abandons his pursuit. She hears his hooves slow, stop, recede and she hates it. She lets him watch her glow recede in the treetops, and she can tell he stares as she predicted he would.

But--when she should be settling, making a stronghold, a nest of her own...she alights. Carefully, quietly, she creeps back around.

She finds him on the ground. He’s made up a sort of lean-to under what must be the lost pillars of a long-ruined temple. He’s used his ragged makeshift cloak and fir boughs to catch the snow where the cloak stretches short. The hide cloak makes her pause; she remembers when he killed the deer for it.

She doesn’t quite need to eat in this strange and infinite void, it seems, but she still hungers at odd moments, especially when she is very weary. She had been in the trees again, watching him labour to butcher the carcass with crude tools and slightly frightening brute strength. He’d looked up and seen her, pausing and regarding her with flat black eyes.

Then he had collected his work and retreated. He left the crude knife stuck in the steaming carcass, and she descended slowly and paused atop the snow, watching him settle himself again with the hide, beginning to lash together a crude frame of twigs. She understood that he was preparing to clean the hide. She understood he was...offering her something. A momentary truce perhaps. Meat to warm herself from the inside out. A brief spell of peace to rest.

She could have run, used the time for an advantage as he struggled to stave off the cold. But she crept closer instead, less bold than usual, watching him consider her and then stake the frame in the icy ground with bulging biceps and begin to clean the hide. His dark-pelted shoulders bunched and released as he worked at it, and occasionally he huffed out a breath that clouded on the air.

She’d settled near the carcass, taken up the crude knife he’d left in the meat, and begun to eat the steaming meat. There had been something oddly possessive about it, her Minotaur watching her eat from his kill. She’d fled to the trees again when he shifted, but she’d stayed when he set up a crude camp in the shelter of a tree. The hide, she understood from hazy memory, had cured sloppily but much faster than it should have. This void they circled in enabling their strange game perhaps. He’d donned it across his massive shoulders and the next morning they’d begun again, fleeing and chasing across the frozen landscape.

And now she stands outside his lean-to, in the dark, watching his banked fire and his massive silhouette slumbering beside it. Their roles reversed. It would be very foolish of her to approach him now; there is nothing to bind him to but the crumbling pillar and she has nothing that would have purchase to hold him.

But she steps closer despite herself, her feet crunching on the snow. A bad sign; she can still almost ghost along the surface, but the soles of her feet press lightly into the snow with faint, whispering crunches. Little tremors are beginning to run through her limbs. She wasted too much time; now, if she went to try and dig herself a snow cave to nest in now she wouldn’t get very far away.

She’d made her choice.

Oddly freeing, that thought. Jane steps under the cover of the draped hide and has to instantly clamp down on a sigh of visceral relief as the warmth from his banked fire washes over her. His breathing fills the room in a steady rush. The Minotaur has fallen asleep sitting up, forearms on his knees, hunched before the fire. His sides expand and release and the hem of her robe almost brushes his calf. He’s removed his armour--what little of it he carries. It lies in a tidy heap, gleaming dully with plainly dedicated maintenance, on a pile of leather straps that bound it to his body as he traveled. She can see the lacing that ties his loincloth to his body on the swell of his hip and it seems to be all that he still wears.

While the boughs and hide are better at trapping heat than she expects, she still can’t fathom how he’s sleeping in this cold with so little. Perhaps it’s partly his hide. Although the pelt’s only long in select places, there is a fine layer of fur over leathery flesh. She can see it on his forearms and shoulders. She steps closer, her bare toes curling as feeling fully returns to them in prickling waves.

He’s truly slumbering deeply if none of this rouses him. He’s always been a consummate hunter. Her scent should be rousing him, the mere movement of her body in this small dark place. Even she can hear the whisper of her gown against her thighs under the steady, rumbling rhythm of his breath.

Has she ever been so close to him before? She must have been. The thought tickles at her mind. But the specifics of the memory seem to have been lost to the mists of time and this endless, cyclical hunt. She creeps another step closer, gaze devouring him with uneasy fascination. The silhouette of him in broad, dark, barbarously cut slabs of muscle and ruffled pelt.

Standing there beside the banked fire, his knees drawn up, his sleek hide dark and vulnerable under her gaze--she realizes, with a start, that her own body has begun to shimmer a little. The aetherial smears on her skin pulse delicately. She hasn’t commanded it to or deliberately drawn on her fading reserves of power. It is a dangerously wasteful expenditure of energy but she isn’t sure how to stop that low, consistent pulsing of heat in her body. It wasn’t a conscious decision.

In his discarded armour she can see a murky reflection of herself. She looks like a damned firefly.

Still, he doesn’t wake. The steady bellows rhythm of his breath remains undisturbed. In slumber it’s safer to approach and even then she knows she’s pushing her luck. But the animal heat of him is intoxicating. Below the curving sweep of one horn a long dark ear flicks back and forth and her fingers flex with the urge to discover if it’s as silky as it looks.

The last of her self-restraint crumbles. Jane reaches out to him, her heart beating so hard it thunders in her throat with physical force. Her fingertips graze thick scarred knuckles and her hands spread with spiderweb delicacy over the thick bones and corded tendons of his wrist. Was he truly still slumbering?

If he woke up--

To be so close to him, after so long watching him as a looming black silhouette on the horizon, jars her. She turns her hand against his, a pallid shadow against his massive, loosely-curled fist, and marvels at the difference. She had been wise to avoid nearness before now, cling to treetops and flit at the edges of vision but far from his hands. If he put his hand around her throat he’d circle it easily. She has never considered herself a small woman before now.

If he stood, would her head even hit his shoulder height? He’d have to hunch, she estimates, to fit in this small space.

Caution ebbs further under the drum of her pulse. She vividly imagines if he lifted his head right now in this moment, if the gleam of his eyes suddenly became alert and wide open, what would she do. What would he do to see her here standing over him, touchable and defenceless and shimmering with gold.

She slides her hand up from his rawboned wrist, over the muscular forearm and up, up towards his shoulder and darkly furred throat. She has the sudden urge to lean over him, seize his horns and pull his face up, _demanding_ that he see her. Her body tips forward, both hands landing squarely on his arms. And then in the moment between one breath and the next she is suddenly looking straight into long-lashed black eyes, dark as an animal’s but sharp and searching as a man’s. The Minotaur’s head has swung up to stare at her, muzzle wrinkling with bristling and drowsy hostility.

And then her hunter almost palpably registers what he is looking at, who stands bent over him, and his whole body jerks into taut readiness. She leaps backwards in a flurry of panic and very late self preservation instinct, thinking again of the breadth of his hand and how easily it could enclose her neck or send her reeling and bleeding into the stone--

Her recoil doesn’t propel her far. She receives a nasty shock when she reaches the opening and her back collides with very solid flesh.

It’s difficult to whip around in this confined space without plunging into the crude firepit, but she manages. Behind her looms the stranger from the treetops. Krampus. Snow covers his shoulders and horns as he peers in. The Minotaur rises with a rumbling snort that vibrates in the soles of her feet, looming menacingly, but he and the beast at the doorway eye each other measuringly instead of with open hostility. Perhaps he is grateful, Jane thinks acidly, that Krampus has helped trap her. The Minotaur cannot possibly know how little stamina she actually possesses for fleeing him right now.

And she had been right. To fit under the leaning pillars and draped hide, the Minotaur has to stoop. He leans over her until in this small space he almost comprises her ceiling.

They stare at each other, hunter and prey and spectator. Then his arm lifts and he reaches for her. As if he has read her mind and aimed to deliver exactly on her fear, his hand sweeps around her throat. Jane rears back, instant panic flooding her system anew, aware that it is too late to act if he truly means to snap her neck and end their dance this way.

The moment hangs in the air, fraught and electric. Thick, rough fingers curve against the thin skin of her throat but don’t close--merely catch the back of her neck and slide a thumb under her chin to tilt her face up to him. She thinks unwillingly of the deer’s legs kicking in the snow for a last brief, frantic moment before the reality of its death set in and chilled the last of its instinctual muscular spasms.

The weight of his hand at the back of her neck arches her onto her toes. The heat of his breath rushes across her face. She wraps her fingers around his wrist and stares at him, defiant but also transfixed.

If she fights him, well, there’s nowhere to go even if she managed to squirm loose. Breath coming choppy and hot, her grip on his wrist shifted to simply a nervous clutch as her airway remained unrestricted, simply….affected.

He is, she thinks with slow realization, probably studying her in bafflement. She had been very, very careful almost until this very specific moment to never come within arm’s reach, to never be touchable and often to be skimming the horizon. His ears turned, cupped as if to zero in on her shallow gasps and the small noise she made when she swallowed and felt the movement press against his calloused thumb. The Minotaur’s dark eyes raked down over her body and she became acutely aware of the folds of her gown not as a liability and inadequate barrier to cold but as a thin drape over her breasts and thighs, gossamer and caressing.

She walked right into his hands and woke him with her touch. His eyes move over her slowly as he digests that.

At the opening of the little shelter, Krampus gives a rasping snort. Without releasing her the Minotaur turned his head to look at their hulking watcher. Krampus settles the rope strap of his basket higher on his snow-dusted shoulder and snorts again and the Minotaur’s eyes swivel to her and back again.

She’s left in the dark but some kind of communication certainly seems to have passed between them. The Minotaur reaches up and sweeps the hide cloak from the pillars with his free hand, sending fir boughs crashing down unanchored on either side.

He does it with a deft jerk of his wrist that sends snow mostly cascading down behind his head but it is still a brusque gesture and snow spatters down her face and collarbone. The cold is sharp and as it hits her skin and rapidly melts the last ice shards slide between her breasts with icy fingers, sapping at her core warmth and letting the cold set in deep. Jane hisses in protest and genuinely fights to twist free for the first time. Her fingers tighten into claws on his wrist.

They both turn shaggy heads to look at her. Rearing back she glares at the Minotaur as the first deep shivers begin to roll through her, sending a jerky tremor through her limbs. He might not know the difference, only seeing her from afar for so long, but she is dismally aware that the glow on her skin is as low as it has ever been in her memory: the visual equivalent of a thin wheeze for breath. Her teeth are not chattering only through the determinedly clenched grit of her jaw.

The Minotaur snorts. If he has thoughts about her weakness, she thinks angrily, the beast can keep them to himself. Battle scarred and massive he might be, but if she hadn’t turned back and come to his camp of her own volition he would be--

Her struggling and shivering, not to mention her furious thoughts, comes to an abrupt halt. The Minotaur shakes out the hide with a snap of his wrist and then sweeps its dryer half over her shoulders. And then, before she can blink or even be grateful, he grasps her and lifts her off her feet as if she is some wisp of a woman. She has no earthly idea how he avoided cracking her skull against the stone pillars that stand for the walls of the shelter. Jane thrashes - briefly and utterly futilely, discovering she had been quite effectively bundled and pinned. The beast that carried her stepped into the open snow, Krampus giving way and allowing him to pass.

The sharp-toothed goat’s head turns to eye her and then slicks sharp teeth together almost delicately. A raspy, throbbing little growl rises, ebbs and rises again in his throat. Is he - laughing at her?

He turns away before she can respond in any way and goes striding through the snow. The Minotaur follows in the trail Krampus breaks, seeming undaunted now while she shivers so convulsively. Unfair, she thinks, but he is very warm against her cheek and she curls into him - has no choice - and feels exhaustion creep up on her. But then he had slept, she supposes, while she took her turn in the snow pursuing him. They had traded places tonight.

Very well then. He can carry her if it pleases him to do so. And she will rest. Her sandaled feet might still dangle in the cold air, but just how pervasive and comforting the heat of his body is takes her off guard. It is as if a weariness she’d ignored for a long time suddenly lands on her shoulders. She rests there, her body slowly going loose against him, allowing herself to unravel. Whatever comes next will come, and she will likely need her strength for it. For now the rhythm of his stride lulls her into a deep drowse.

+++

She wakes fully and all at once, though, to the smell of food. Briefly and instinctively struggling to sit up got her nowhere; she remains swaddled and the Minotaur’s arms remain wrapped firmly around her. So instead she simply cranes her neck, fascinated, as she peers around.

They are in a house now, with log walls and a massive stone fireplace where a lively fire burns. A long table sits in front of that hearth and it is heaped with food: a roast boar, tureens of soup, trenchers of glistening berries and bowls of roasted vegetables. Candles march down the length of that table in heavy, tarnished metal stands. There are three tankards sitting at the head of the table nearest the fur covered hearth as if waiting for them. The boar is half-carved, even slices peeling off the back and running with clear and fragrant juices.

Her stomach growls. Loudly.

The Minotaur snorts at her. He does not set her down. Krampus shakes himself, the last of the melting snow dusting off the dark fur at his nape, and selects one of the carved pieces of meat.

She assumes, squirming and ignored, that he intends to eat it. Perhaps the Minotaur will have to put her down, finally, to partake. Not, Jane acknowledges, that she has any desire to run other than perhaps the lingering tug of habit. Her mouth waters fervently and she almost feels dizzy with long-dormant hunger. Let that be a lesson; do they _need_? Perhaps not, but they seem to be as susceptible to the earthly desires of the body as anyone.

With a brutally sharp looking knife Krampus cuts the hunk of meat into strips and then - the juices running down his gnarled fingers - presses one to her mouth.

Her first reaction is simple startlement and an instinctive struggle to free her hands to accept the food that way. Neither of the creatures budge, though, and she cautiously opens her mouth. Tender meat fills her mouth with smoky flavour, warming her from the inside out. She eats as greedily as he’ll allow but when Krampus turns back to the table she begins to struggle in earnest. She has an abrupt impatience to be down, moving, not held suspended above the ground waiting for a decision to be made about her as if she’s a sack of grain.

At first the Minotaur doesn’t budge. His grip on her only tightens seemingly reflexively. His eyes are on the table, watching their strange host’s movements. But she twists harder, demanding his attention, and he looks down at her. His gaze sharpens on her face and he turns and takes two strides to reach the furs spread out in front of the fire.

He lets her go, allowing her to tumble down onto the fur. But then he follows her down, hunched over her in a tense, bunched crouch. He is so close her breath plays over the dense dark hairs on his nose. Before he was a darkly hewn shape in the embers’ light; now he’s awake, staring, burning eyes locked onto her. His head is scarred but the nose looks startlingly soft and tender.

He crowds in and she catches his jaw with one hand, fingers curling against the heavy bone. His hands are on her thighs, fingers dimpling the flesh, head lowered as he snorts as if forbidding her to flee: commanding her to be still.

Face to face he is a looming presence, muzzle furrowed as if he wants to speak and eyes ablaze. She finds that nonetheless she’s no longer afraid of what he might do with her now that she’s walked into his grasp. She lies there, warm, her breath unsteady, and feels - feels -

The almost physical press of his body heat retreats a little. Jane casts her gaze upward and realizes their strange host has come to join them on the rug.

In his hand he’s carrying one of the heavy, crudely-hewn tankards from the table. He crouches beside them, the coarse fabric of his red pants slightly damp from melted snowflakes. His face is bestial even by the standards of a muse hunted by the Minotaur for half an eon. His jutting teeth fit together like a bear trap in his jaw and his eyes glow icy white in the chilly flesh of his horned head.

He offers her the tankard. When she accepts his hand drops to the back of her head and twines through her hair there. He bends over her as she lifts the tankard to her lips. She drinks deeply, swallowing it and feeling it spread heat through her insides, and drinks deeply again, droplets slipping - leaking from the corners of her mouth, tickling her throat - and breaks away, gasping, as sharp teeth part and a long, curling red tongue rasps at her jaw.

The hot wet touch shocks through her. She feels as if she has been teetering on a precipice and this strips away the last veil. She only touched the Minotaur’s arms in that close small space; she had not grasped his horns and dragged his head up to nuzzle, to press those wide and mobile lips against her skin. Now their intent, shared like a hot single heartbeat, is unmistakable. Krampus seizes a hold of her, one hand in her hair and one at the curve of her waist, and the Minotaur rises to his feet and moves toward the table. She can’t focus well on him. Her mind only shivers and scatters as Krampus’ muzzle bumps against her jaw and moves down her throat, licking at her with a silky and demanding touch.

She sets the tankard down a little too hard. It scrapes against the floor just off the edge of the rug, liquid sloshing against her wrist. Her hands are shaking now: best not to keep a hold of it.

Krampus shifts where he is crouched behind her and he settles down. His knees bend up around her and his body frames hers, his fingers still twined through her hair. His long, bony jaw slips forward over her shoulder, reaching down to the top curve of her breast. Between his sharp teeth out slips that hot, red, inhumanly long tongue. He draws her back until her spine curves into him, responding to the delicate tugging of his hand in her hair and the hard pressure his muscular body. Pulls and coaxes her until she bows up beneath him to give his seeking red tongue the access he desires.

That long, long tongue moves down the curve of her breasts, hot and damp, leaving a cool trail behind in the air. It slips beneath the white, flimsy fabric of her dress, lapping at the vanishing trace of liquid until her heart is pounding so hard she feels like it might come out through her skin.

The Minotaur’s shadow returns, cast over her sprawled legs. Jane stares up, panting, her mind getting more and more deeply tangled and languorous. He’s holding one of the trenchers of berries in his hand and a roasted tuber in the other that vanishes into his mouth before she can identify it.

Her stomach rumbles, but when the Minotaur kneels between her spread legs she’s thinking of something else entirely. Krampus’ tongue curl around her puckered nipple under the thin weight of her gown and she hisses softly, shuddering as he draws his knees and hand back a little to let the Minotaur's gaze rake fully over her form.

The Minotaur reaches up with a handful of dark, dripping berries and holds them insistently to her mouth. Her lips part, dark sweetness flooding her mouth, and she licks at his fingers, catching the thick calloused flesh of them between her teeth. His hot breath gusts across her body, plastering her gown against the curled shape of Krampus’ tongue on her breast.

No, they’re not immune to hunger.

He doesn't seem to begrudge their host, she thinks hazily, but his touch in every other respect is nothing but possessive, arrogant, demanding. Her hand is still on his jaw and now she finds herself gripping his tufted beard, her hands curling and scratching helplessly at dark pelt and down to the cords of his neck as he leans in. He feeds her, snorting at the pressure of her hand at his chin and throat as she pulls him in.

 _More_ , she thinks, dazed, and as their situation sinks in - she is _warm_ at long last, there is food and mead in her belly, the sky hasn’t fallen in when their chase paused - all her unease and confusion and agitation morphs into a hot, sticky ball in her stomach. _Greed._

She _wants._

Thoughts nibble and pluck at the edges of her mind asking _what now, what does it mean, is this allowed?_ This seems too...kind for the strange world between worlds they've been trapped in together since before memory began. But she supposes maybe cruel is also too strong a word for their ordeal. Only pitiless.

The Minotaur grasps her chin suddenly, not dissimilar to the way she clutches his. He forces her to look in his eyes and her wandering mind tumbles back into the moment; even if she had wanted to stay distracted in her musings it is beyond her once he touches her in that way.

They're strangers to each other, yet bound more intimately than she can imagine being with any other creature. His knees are between her legs now. Jane breathes in shallowly, feeling a ripple of awareness as heady sensation move down her body, and she slides her legs up. Her calves graze the outside of his thighs. He has gone so still she is almost startled when his ribs abruptly flare with an indrawn breath.

She releases his beard. The air thickens with heat between them. The trencher of stewed winter berries in his hand is easy to dip into; she licks the red smear of juice off her own lips and presses berries to his mouth. Behind her their host waits and watches with his ineffably amused, sharp-toothed patience. Krampus has kept his fingers twined in her hair but without releasing his grip entirely. That hand moves against her scalp, almost massaging.

She feeds her Minotaur, and he feeds her. His tongue moves lightly against her fingertips, short hairs on his muzzle tickling her palm, his big hand undoubtedly smearing juice against her chin as it falls away for more. And then he casts the dish aside and leans in. It startles her into an open mouthed gasp as his tongue swipes her chin and then moves down to her dizzyingly pounding pulse.

When has the last of the winter chill fled even her toes? Every inch of her skin feels tender. He grasps her waist and she knows his hands stain the white fabric as he drags her forward, and up, until it's not just her calves twining and rubbing and shifting against him but the heat at his groin, barely contained by the loincloth, blazing against the tender skin of her inner thighs.

Krampus, though, has not yet given up his grip on her hair. She stretches between them, gasping, back arched, as the Minotaur rears up and stares at their host.

Their host doesn't yield. The stare doesn't cause him to so much as blink. Is Krampus their punishment for faltering? But he arrived before she or the Minotaur broke the unspoken rules of their existence. Jane makes a sound low in her throat, scrabbling her nails at the massive scarred chest above her, and the burning eyes of her Minotaur move down to her.

All of her knowledge of Krampus drifts to her through the mist of myth like a half-remembered dream, but she tastes blood at the edges of his name, and she knows what her Minotaur is capable of. She has no desire for this one evening offered to them to devolve into bloodshed and more hardship - even if, at the end, they discover a worm in the proffered apple.

She meets the Minotaur’s eyes and wonders how much he understands: wonders how much this strange, prideful creature knows about her. Over time she learned to read the weight and rhythm of his footfalls, the angle of his head late in the day. Has he, the same way, learned to read the way her shoulders draw up and her eyes narrow? The way he lowers his head, eyes narrowed, and snorts against her skin in a hot gust of breath, makes her think he has.

She trails her hands down, spreading them hungrily against his chest, his sides, feeling the change from dense pelt to shorter hairs, feeling the skin drawn a little too taut against the ridges of muscle. They go on in such hunger, the two of them, and they will continue to do so.

She lets herself be pliant against the hand in her hair, the Minotaur's hands on her body. Pliant, soft, but demanding: she pulls him down to her, feeling the prickle as Krampus' grip yields a little, tightens, softens. Their host, she thinks, is teasing them both.

But whatever game he's playing, he lets her kiss the Minotaur's nose, his jaw where the bone is heavy and the muscle rigid. She arches up and Krampus' arms shift to let her suspend her weight between her shoulders which he cradles and the legs she twines tight around the Minotaur's hips. She pulls them together and feels the heat and weight of his erect cock fully against her.

The Minotaur presses down above her, one hand falling away from her in a sudden need to prop himself up, and the sound he makes is ragged and deep in his chest as if he's taken a sudden wound.

She can't kiss his throat; she can't quite reach as their host still holds her. But she can blow a breath against him and stroke him, feeling her greed go boundless and wild in its indulgence. She wants to touch him, to _feel_ the heat and tension of him.

This particular flavour of hunger feels more likely to kill her from lack of fulfilment than any craving for food has in all their long years of chasing. They rock against each other, slow and hard, and she bares her teeth at him as the loincloth slips but doesn't entirely fall away. The ridge of his cock slips against her through the very thin fabric of her underclothes, parting the lips of her sex and teasing her. He drops his head, muscular shoulders bunching with tension, and grasps her hips enough to control their movements.

Her bared teeth are not a deterrent; he teases her, slowing the way they rock together, bearing down with greater pressure as he slides against the peak of her pleasure. She didn't expect it from him. An arch against him, an _undulation_ , and he bends to her will just a little more: he drags the head of his cock down instead of rubbing its length against her and teases, almost slipping it beneath the fabric, almost reaching the place where she is slick and hot and oh so giving.

Just as she is about to reach up and sink her nails into him in a furious demand, Krampus pulls her hair, and then grasps her body and pulls her _back_. She cries out, and the Minotaur rears back; his sheer physical presence is not lessened by the erection the loincloth has now utterly failed to hide.

Krampus turns her over and she lands on her knees and elbows, jarred and gasping. When she looks up he is bending to her, his ice-white eyes somehow still perceptibly raking over her body. His hand slides against her jaw and back into her hair and she drags in a deep breath.

She pushes up onto her hands, staring challengingly at him, and his bared teeth lose none of their sense of ancient amusement. One thumb flicks over her chin and traces down the front of her throat. It's maybe a challenge, or simply an invitation; for what she is not sure, but she can hazard a guess.

Her hair has come loose from its simple binding. It slips into her eyes as she turns to look over her shoulder, Krampus' grip prickling against her scalp. Their eyes meet, hers and her eternal pursuers; the Minotaur studies the two before him narrowly.

The moment, the decision, hangs in the air between them. But was there ever really a question? They don't need to speak to accept this heady proposal. It's only an idea they understood instinctively from the start moving further into the open. Into _fruition._

Her Minotaur's big hand moves across her hip and to her belly. Her gown has slipped a little back down from her hips and a simple rake of his fingertips pushes it back up to the small of her back. She is still looking backward at him when his hand finds the knots at her hips and unbinds her undergarments entirely, fisting his hand carelessly in the material over her ass and yanks it away. The movement sparks a low noise in her throat that turns gasping and shuddery as he moves in behind her and his heat abruptly fills the soft space between her thighs.

But still - again - he does not fill her. He strokes her with the head of his cock and watches her as though devouring the twist of her mouth and stark pleading eyes. And before she can try to reach back or push back Krampus' hand in her hair turns her face back to him.

The snow has melted entirely on his body, leaving behind only the dark pelt, long razored snout and pallid skin. Their eyes lock hazily. She knows what he wants; it's not hard to deduce. She bares her teeth at him now, mimicking his feral smile.

That sound rises in his throat again, that throbbing ebbing growl. Her Minotaur begins to press inside her, rocking her whole body forward from the hot, mind-blanking stretch, and her mouth is open on a broken cry as she clutches the waist of Krampus' ragged red pants and drags him forward to plant a kiss there on his skin.

Jane's fingers fumble and tug at the rope that binds his pants. The heat of her Minotaur behind her threatens to drown her mind, and the slow inexorable advance - his hand clamps on her waist, keeping her still even as his body presses her forward, as her knees slide and she shudders under the steady and patient invasion. The scent of sex surrounds her as she drags the red fabric down and finds the heat and insistence of Krampus' cock against her cheek. It is not quite human looking, tapering, but she wouldn't have the presence of mind to be surprised or bothered even if she had the inclination.

She is drawn out between them, suspended between twin demands of hand and cock. The next gasping cry is muffled by his cock as she slips the head into her mouth, pressing her tongue against the underside of its tapering head. He shudders the same as a human man might, but then perhaps that was her nails raking his hip or the vibration of her wail as her Minotaur breaks his long and patient slide into a hard thrust that spears deep and slick into her body.

For a moment he settles inside her as they both shudder; he is bowed down over her back, she can tell from his panting breath stirring her hair across her shoulders, from the heat of his body sweeping closer. She is spread so open, split so wide, that the moment of stillness is a blessed reprieve. One of her Minotaur's hands has gone under her body and spread just below her breasts, taking some of her shuddering weight off her knees and the hand in her hair.

Jane shifts her hips and has to pull off Krampus' cock, gasping and pressing her face against his pelvis instead, clutching him in a plea for patience. Is it pleasure, discomfort, simply an electric overload of stimulation? She - isn't entirely sure. He is so deep inside her.

Krampus' hand leaves her hair and cradles her jaw and throat. The Minotaur pulls her up and she yelps, craning to stare at Krampus, arching her back as her weight arched up almost sinks her Minotaur too deep for her body to comfortably bear. She is not human herself, but neither is she impossible to hurt, and she feels as if she dangles at the very edge of -

Krampus licks her throat, her breast, oh-so delicately pinches his teeth around her flesh, then reaches down with rough fingertips and rubs the seat of her pleasure. The firm drag of his hand arcs sensation through her entire body; she jolts, clutching at him, and the sound that flies from her open mouth is almost a snarl of her own. Her body clenches in a wild demand around the cock inside of her.

The Minotaur reacts, the heat of his chest against her back, and almost _roars._ He hunches over her, dislodging Krampus' hand with his own against her sex and sternum. He bears her down again as his body curves over hers and Krampus lets him for a moment, licking the edges of her gasping mouth and chuffing his strange, rasping laugh in her ear.

But he is not finished with her, of course. And as her Minotaur begins to actually _thrust_ \- slow, heady dragging thrusts that send shockwaves through her whole body - Krampus cradles her head and then slides his hands into her hair.

Jane breathes them both in, thick dark musk of sex and smoke and snow, and she rubs her face against his belly. The depth of her hunger almost shocks her, but she is quickly deciding that pausing to marvel at what is happening is a waste of all their time.

She takes him in her hand first and then the tip of his cock in her mouth. She cannot pretend it is an act of great artistry; she feels half crazed, and barely with enough presence of mind to pause and spit in her palm for lubrication. In this suddenly Krampus is strangely indulgent, running his fingers through her hair. Between the two of them they fuck her mouth, the steady surge of her Minotaur's hips pushing her forward and Krampus' grip keeping her on him.

If she could think, could order her breath and her hands and her mouth - but the heat raging through her body leaves her very little rationality left. Her Minotaur fucks her in slow, hard thrusts and Krampus strokes her hair and draws delicate patterns on her shoulder blades. Between them it is a wave of unstopping sensation until she'd almost scream if not for his cock in her mouth. She barely has enough rationality to gasp for air.

Their position curved around her body had stilled her Minotaur's hand but now he sinks back on his haunches until she sinks against his lap, her knees spread wider than ever by his legs, and his fingers find her again. It takes him very little time to understand what makes her jerk and writhe the strongest; impressive considering she had half believed she couldn't go further out of her mind with pleasure. And he exploits it with the hard insistent stroke of rough fingerpads as his hips jerk up into her body in more and more savage short thrusts.

A coil of tension, of white hot pleasure, winds tighter and tighter in her body. She takes Krampus' cock as deep into her mouth as she can bear and still manage to breathe in gasps, drowning in the heat and musk of him both scent and taste. Her jaw aches and her nails rake at his hips but she is not asking him to stop.

He does not, even when the Minotaur wraps both arms around her waist and begins driving into her with harsh and mindless force. He is chasing his own climax, his horns scraping her shoulders as his head bends to her, and Jane tightens her body around him with a raw cry, pulling off Krampus' cock to gasp for air. When he comes, he roars and it is deafening.

His hips press to hers as the heat of him floods her inside, and she hangs on a precipice. His arms twine tightly around her and settle her against his body, surrounding her with heat but giving her no sweet final touch to send her over the edge. She squeezes around him again and moans, demanding.

Before he can regain his senses and act, though, Krampus pulls Jane away from him.

The sensation of him leaving her body leaves her gasping; she would be cursing if she had enough mind left to remember words in a single one of the infinite languages she knows. Krampus doesn't give her time to be angry or needy or pleading; he presses her into the furs spread beneath them and is on top of her with his elbows hooked under her knees and plunging inside before another breath can leave her lungs.

Jane arches hard off the rug as he sinks inside. He is so close to her, watching her as his hips grind hard against her. His depths, his closeness, the scent and weight of him makes her shudder in hard waves. As if from a distance she can hear her voice crying out in wordless, pleading cries as she drags at him. _Move, move_ , if he will just - she reaches down her belly herself and he captures her hand and laughs at her again, his throbbing rasping laugh that vibrates through his whole body against her, and begans to fuck her hard.

Despite her pinioned hands it does not last long. He releases her legs from his arms and slides one of his hands between them, watching her, always watching her. She twines her legs around him instantly, pulling as if she can get him deeper than he is, as if she can trap him there.

Her Minotaur bends over them both, gaze black and satiated and he's captured both her wrists for their host, drawing them above her head. She clutches at him as Krampus' fingers find the seat of her pleasure and move in slick firm circles right above the place where he drives in and out of her. That is all she needs, and when she finally, finally, crests and shatters and orgasms what comes out of her is a full throated scream.

The tightening of her body seems to disintegrate the last of Krampus' stamina. He bows down toward her, snarling head still somehow seeming to laugh at her through his sharp teeth as he thrusts deep one last time and stills inside of her.

And then they're tautly still, all of them, for a long moment as the fire crackles and the blood slowly, slowly begins to gentle its pounding pace in her ears.

Krampus slides from her and draws back, and she lets him go with a shiver. He returns to a crouch and then shakes himself. Jane looks at him from under lowered lashes, her fingers moving in a slow caress against her Minotaur's wrists. The gesture has resettled his pelt, but not entirely. Her eyes drift shut. Much like food and warmth lack of sleep has not been fatal to them before but its temptation claws at her. She feels - warm and languid and feel of deep seated pleasure, and she knows whose hands are pulling her up now and cradling her against his chest.

Her eternal companion. She lets her head slump against his shoulder, her gown slipping back down over her legs. Perhaps they'll have to go soon, their strange cycling hunt resuming. Perhaps they'll have a lengthy reprieve. Perhaps they'll never leave this strange log house, and she'll wake in just a moment to sate herself further on the food spread out for them.

For the moment, the question doesn't trouble her. She is pleased enough to rest, knowing nothing about the future, his heartbeat pounding under her ear.


End file.
